Issue No. 102 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting spotlights a book to help you eliminate boring meetings and urges you to appoint a PowerPoint guru. Plus, check out my Management Buckets website with dozens of resources and downloadable worksheets for your staff meetings.
News Flash! Congratulations to David Bury, who is receiving a complimentary registration to Mastering the Management Buckets Workshop Experience this fall. And thanks to everyone who completed the online reader survey. Your comments inspired me!
Death by PowerPoint Syndrome
When American Idol hit the airwaves, the popular TV show gave false hope to bad singers. When the popular PowerPoint presentation software was introduced by Microsoft, it gave false hope to inexperienced presenters—and turned uninspiring meetings into really boring meetings. It was death by PowerPoint.
But there’s hope and there’s help. Quick! Order this book and delegate all future PowerPoint presentations to ONLY those who have read and mastered the innovative approach in this remarkable book.
To order from Amazon, click on this title: Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 to Create Presentations That Inform, Motivate and Inspire, by Cliff Atkinson. This is a MUST title for your resource library. The book also includes a CD with custom templates for storyboarding, checklists to ensure your presentation is compelling, and a complete eBook. (And thanks to Buckets workshop alumnus John Wilson, executive director of Lake Avenue Community Foundation, Pasadena, Calif., for this week’s book recommendation.)
P.S. When you identify the PowerPoint guru for your team, point them to Garr Reynolds’ blog on issues related to professional design and presentation, such as “Where can you find good images?” Plus, you’ll appreciate the new insights from his 131-slide summary of the book Brain Rules (which I reviewed in Issue No. 79). Visit “Brain Rules for PowerPoint and Keynote Presenters.”
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
1. Raise your hand if you’ve ever been bored by a PowerPoint presentation.
2. The author of Beyond Bullet Points says the first five slides of a PowerPoint presentation are the most important. Why might stories and pictures be absolutely critical in a presentation?
Culture and Canaries - Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Nonprofit
If “excellence” is one of your core values, you’ll eliminate the “Death by PowerPoint Syndrome.” Raising the bar and living your values is a mandate of the Culture Bucket, chapter 8, in Mastering the Management Buckets.
In The Minister’s MBA, George S. Babbes and Michael Zigarelli discuss the McKinsey 7-S framework for organizational design (Structure, Systems, Style, Staff, Skills, Strategy and Shared values at the core). They write, “You might find it helpful to think of your ministry’s culture as a canary in a coal mine. Like the canary that dies when an invisible toxin is in the air, your culture’s health will also indicate dangerous dysfunctions. It will tell you if one or more of the other Ss are underdeveloped or otherwise out of alignment.”
Culture and core values matter, so you must mentor your entire team to keep an eye on the canary in your organization. Every team member, board member and volunteer—if you cast a vision for an enriching corporate culture—will help you build and enhance it. They will sound the alarm when your culture is being violated. Give them permission to call a timeout even if the canary just sings off-tune. Something might be amiss.
To download the helpful worksheet, “Our Corporate Culture,” visit the Culture Bucket at the Management Buckets website.
FALL 2008 WORKSHOP DATES. Join your colleagues at one of our Buckets or Board workshops this fall. For more details and to download the workshop brochures, visit The Workshop page on the Management Buckets website.
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